


Nocturnal Enuresis

by grossalien (Propriety_is_not_a_priority)



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bedwetting, Canonical Character Death, Diapers, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Tony Angst, Tony Feels, Underage Drinking, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 03:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4332900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Propriety_is_not_a_priority/pseuds/grossalien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark is a bedwetter in college. No one can ever know. Especially not his dad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nocturnal Enuresis

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it was time. It's been too long since I wrote proper trash fic. Poor Tony.
> 
> This is based on an omo headcanon from my omo blog queeromo.tumblr.com, on which I post a lot of avengers wetting and watersports, and make Bucky and Tony sad a lot.

Tony can’t remember a time when it wasn’t a problem.

When he was a kid, he had Jarvis to help him clean up, and the butler was kind enough to buy pull-ups out of his own salary, for Tony to wear when he’d had a couple of wet nights in a row. They kept it a secret from Howard, who always yelled, and had no problem letting Tony know how much of a disappointment he was, even without the bedwetting.

His anger only got worse as Tony got older, but after Tony turned 10, he was down to once a month or less, and so he thought it might be safe.

 

o00o

 

That only lasted until he left for college. Jarvis insisted on a separate apartment, instead of a room at a frathouse, since Tony was so much younger than the others. Howard said yes without much of a fight, disinterested in the social and practical parts of the experience, as long as Tony’s grades were impressing everyone.

Tony got to be grateful for the solitude quickly enough.

He’d just barely turned 15, and he was angry at everything. Homesick, but pretending not to be, angry at his parents for sending him away, angry at the people around him for not understanding and for treating him like at child, irrationally angry at Jarvis for not being there, and most of all angry at himself for being scared and lonely and not good enough.

 

o00o

 

“Hey kid, are you just gonna go home? Why don’t you socialize a bit, we’d love to get to know you better.” Someone Tony’d never talked to before put an arm around his shoulders, and the guy’s friends unsuccessfully tried to hide their laughter.

Tony went with them, not caring much about anything.

He got drunk with a bunch of strangers, all of them at least 3 years older than himself, and he felt on top of the world, happy and charming. He felt like he fit in, let himself pretend that the loud boys who brought him along were his friends, that they wanted him there because they liked him.

The party was huge and everyone knew who he was and wanted to buy him drinks. Tony Stark was at the center of it all, joking and laughing and taking dares. He drank a lot and stumbled home in the early hours of the morning, ending up alone in his tiny bathroom, throwing up for hours and sobbing for Jarvis in between heaves, before finally dragging himself into bed.

 

Tony woke up weak and sick, and with the familiar feeling of piss pooling up his back. He cried into his pillow, feeling very young and very pathetic. The mattress was stained, and he spent hours trying to fix it, sniffling and never able to fully stop the tears. In the end, the stain was still there. He imagined he could see the tiny stains of snot and tears too.

He kept a low profile for the next days, sure that somehow people would be able to see it on him, see that he was a baby, a homesick piss-baby with pale yellow discoloring on his bed. But the next Friday, someone vaguely familiar invited him to another party, and Tony said yes. What else was he supposed to do?

 

Jarvis called him every second weekend. Four weeks in to the semester, their conversations went something like this:

_“How are you? Is everything truly alright?”_

_“I’m fine Jarvis. Never been better! Everything is perfect. In fact, I’ve made a lot of friends already.”_

_“That’s wonderful to hear, Tony. I must admit to having worried about you.”_

_“No need to worry at all, I’m having a blast. Actually, I need to go pretty soon, one of my friends, uh, Kevin, invited me over tonight.”_

_“Oh, alright. I won’t keep you then. Have good time tonight, and let me know if you need anything at all.”_

 He didn’t remember what the guy who hosted the party was called, but Kevin was as good a name as any.

Jarvis had enough on his plate without worrying about some whiny baby who wasn’t even his own kid. It wasn’t like he could do anything from back home anyway, it was just Tony’s own body betraying him, nothing anyone could do.

 

o00o

 

Tony promised himself that no one would ever know. It was okay as long as it was just his own problem, no big deal. He would just have to make sure that he didn’t fall asleep anywhere but at his own place. No one else could crash there after a party either.

It would have to work out.

 

He got used to waking up with wet sheets and thanked everything that there was no one around to see. He didn’t dare buy protection, because he was sure that his father had someone monitoring his accounts, since he was living off his trust-fund. No one had commented on the money he spent on alcohol, true, but that didn’t prove anything. Tony doubted anyone would be surprised. After all, Howard had been the one to hand him his first glad of scotch at the tender age of 9. He was just following in his dear dad’s footsteps.

He learned how to get piss out of fabric, and resigned himself to having a mattress that looked like it belonged to a 5-year-old. He could have stopped drinking and hoped that would finally get rid of his problem completely, of course, but that didn’t seem like an option. People liked him at parties. He liked himself a lot better after the first two beers.

 

o00o

 

He lost his virginity at his sixth party.

She wanted him to come back to her room, and he did, but afterwards he got up and put his clothes back on, even though he would have liked to lie next to her a little longer. She was sweet and it had been nice - if a little awkward. But he’d had a lot to drink, and he knew what that meant. It wouldn’t have been safe to fall asleep.

 

Tony got a reputation for being a playboy, before he hit 16.

“Kevin”, who was actually named Cal, slapped Tony on the back and pretended it was him who’d made Tony ‘a real man’, by inviting him into their social sphere and teaching him the joys of alcohol and women. Tony gave him a bitingly sarcastic retort, which made everyone around them laugh, and the conversation moved on. But he still felt his skin crawl a little where Cal’d touched him. He didn’t want to be like that, he didn’t want to be someone you couldn’t get close to and yet, and yet-

He couldn’t see a way around it. You could never wake up next to Tony Stark.

 

The one time it happened, the one time he fell asleep next to a girl after sex, he’d just turned 17 and was feeling good about life. He was popular and things were going alright.

He was a little buzzed but not drunk, very relaxed and too exhausted to get up straight away, and before he knew it, he was dropping off.

He woke up in a panic after 3 hours of sleep, already peeing, and didn’t manage to stop the piss dribbling out before there was a basketball sized wet spot on the bed. He stared at it for a couple of seconds, before looking over at the girl curled up next to him under the blanket. Her name was Catherine. She was nice - funny and smart.

He couldn’t trust her.

He poured the rest of his beer from last night over the wet spot, and Catherine woke up with a startle, and shouted at him. She threw him out and told everyone about how he’d woken up in the middle of the night to drink beer and then ruined her bed by spilling it everywhere. She was angry for an entire month, and the entire campus gossiped about Tony’s alcohol problem (The first time in Tony's life that particular rumor went around - but definitely not the last). It was still better.

 

o00o

 

Tony finished college the top of his class, youngest in a couple of decades, and with a lot of friends. He had 200 phone numbers in his address book, and there wasn’t one of them he’d feel comfortable calling just to talk.

The only person who’d ever slept over at his apartment was Rhodey, and that was on a week night up to exams, where they fell asleep over their books.

Maybe Tony could have had more people over, but it was too much of a risk. He didn’t actually wet the bed that often, when he wasn’t drunk, it had only happened a few times when he was really stressed or hadn’t slept for a few days. But how’d he explain to a friend that they could crash at his place anytime, except when he’d been drinking? It was safer to just keep everyone at an arms length.

 

o00o

 

Then his parents died.

 

Jarvis was busy taking care of all the arrangements and had to spend a lot of time away. He greeted Tony with a hug at the airport, but left soon after, frazzled and grieving.

Tony holed up in the empty mansion, sending away all the staff. He got drunk enough to forget his own name, taking a twisted pleasure in guzzling down his father’s expensive liquor and his mother’s sweet white wines. The mixture made him nauseous right from the start, but it seemed fitting. He threw up on the carpet in his Howard’s study, and passed out on his parents’ bed, the one Maria hadn’t slept in for years.

When he woke up, Rhodey was knocking on the door, he’d pissed himself, and his parents were still dead.

Rhodey let himself in, probably in response to Tony crying loud enough for him to hear. He didn’t say a thing, as he took in the scene - Tony curled up into a ball, crumbled shirt stained with puke and lying in a puddle of his own piss that was spreading out across the too expensive bedcover. Instead he calmly helped a dripping, sobbing Tony into the shower, shushed him when he tried to apologize, and pulled the bedcover up before Tony had to see it again.

 

o00o

 

Rhodey stayed with him the five days until the funeral.

Tony wet the bed every night, and he was sober for three of them.

He was too empty to feel embarrassed, and ended up feeling mostly vague relief that he didn’t have to hide it from Rhodey anymore, and that his friend was still there. Rhodey asked him after the second night of sober bedwetting if that was why he didn’t sleep with anyone.

“What do you mean, don’t you know I sleep with anyone with a pulse?” It was a weak joke, and Tony didn’t quite manage to force the tone of levity he’d aimed for.

In the end he simply nodded stiffly, before getting up from the couch. He didn’t want to talk about it.

 

He wore sunglasses at the funeral, to hide his dry eyes, and refused to speak.

After it was over he went directly to a convenience store and bought the first brand of adult diapers he could find. He felt a sense of sardonic amusement at the whole thing. Heir to an empire at 21, arguably about to become one of the most powerful men in America, and the first thing he used his fortune on was buying the diapers, his father wouldn’t let him have.

Obie was disappointed that he didn’t come to the wake.

 

o00o

 

Tony went back to MIT as soon as possible, proudly throwing a party at the new and bigger apartment he bought with his inherited money. When Obadiah called to point out how it looked to the media, Tony declared it his own type of wake and hung up.

He got drunk and crawled on top of his bar to make a speech to his dead parents that was so full of hidden jabs that Rhodey was actually having to stifle giggles. Which might also have something to do with how smashed the guy was, but it still made Tony feel better.

He invited Rhodey to stay over, after. He didn’t try to hide the fact that he was wearing a diaper, and Rhodey didn’t comment, and didn’t seem uncomfortable with it at all. Tony felt strangely content.

 

The week after, his phone rang again, that Jarvis was dead.

**Author's Note:**

> Might continue this, who knows. Might turn more of my headcanons into fic, who knows. One thing I do know is this: no one can ever convince me that Tony Stark doesn't wet himself far more than is respectable for a man his age.


End file.
